No Visas Needed, Poles Flood Germany

Europe took another important step toward integration Monday as tens of thousands of Poles celebrated the start of visa-free travel to six European Community countries by flooding across the country’s western frontier into Germany.

It marked the latest and largest breakthrough toward unencumbered personal movement on a continent where travel was once tangled in bureaucracy and blocked by the Iron Curtain that divided it between East and West for over 40 years.

As midnight approached at the eastern German border crossing in Goerlitz, a line of cars stretched about 25 miles back into Poland waiting to cross. Long backups were also reported at other checkpoints, and Polish railroad officials said all seats had been reserved on trains running between Warsaw and Berlin.

By early evening, an estimated 50,000 people had entered Germany, according to German border control officials.

Under terms of the accord negotiated over a period of several months, Poles can enter Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Italy for a period of three months with nothing more than a stamp routinely issued at the borders of any one of the Western countries.

Most Poles crossing into Germany Monday appeared headed for Berlin and other large German cities for brief shopping binges, stocking up on goods not available or far more expensive at home. Others are expected to try to find work on the black market.

By the middle of the day in Berlin, groups of Poles could be seen hauling cassette radios, color television sets and videotape recorders along the city’s Kantstrasse.

While the influx of Polish shoppers brings a potential consumer boom, it also has snarled traffic, generated long supermarket lines and often irritated German residents to a point where fringe right-wing German nationalists have taken up the issue.

In Frankfurt an der Oder, a small group of youthful neo-Nazi extremists smashed windows in one Polish bus shortly after midnight and clashed with police near a bridge across the Oder River.

In other cities, such as Goerlitz, the first wave of Polish visitors were presented flowers by local officials.